Varnish 2.06 running away with memory

[Sam Crawford]

Scott,

Thanks for that, I'll experiment with that and see how we fare!

Regards,

Sam


On 18 May 2010 15:19, Scott Wilson <scott at idealist.org> wrote:
> Hi Sam,
>
> On 18 May 2010 10:47, Sam Crawford <samcrawford at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Morning all,
>>
>> A bit of a newbie question I fear... We've been successfully running
>> Varnish 2.04 for over a year now on our intranet, and have found in
>> the past two days that our instances in one particular region are
>> eating up a lot of system memory. We've upgraded to 2.06 a couple of
>> days ago, and are still experiencing the same issue.
>>
>
>> n_purge                246879          .   N total active purges
>> n_purge_add            252285         5.61 N new purges added
>> n_purge_retire           5406         0.12 N old purges deleted
>> n_purge_obj_test       245731         5.46 N objects tested
>> n_purge_re_test     214813964      4773.11 N regexps tested against
>> n_purge_dups             3227         0.07 N duplicate purges removed
>> hcb_nolock                  0         0.00 HCB Lookups without lock
>> hcb_lock                    0         0.00 HCB Lookups with lock
>> hcb_insert                  0         0.00 HCB Inserts
>> esi_parse                   0         0.00 Objects ESI parsed (unlock)
>> esi_errors                  0         0.00 ESI parse errors (unlock)
>>
>
> It looks to me like you're generating an awful lot of purge list
> entries.  We struggled for a long time with this problem before
> abandoning purge in favour of setting object TTLs to 0.  See this FAQ
> entry:
>
> http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/VCLExamplePurging
>
> The problem we were having was that we were using purge to implement
> force-refresh functionality, but there are so many badly behaved
> crawlers and other clients out there that send always send the NoCache
> header that the purge list would swamp all available resources.
>
> Hope that helps!  cheers,
> scott
>